TAM SAM SOM for a Swiss market

TAM SAM SOM for a Swiss market is three nested counts: everyone who could ever need the outcome, everyone you can realistically reach with your language, channel and compliance, and everyone you can win in a sensible horizon given how you sell today.

TAM SAM SOM for a Swiss market

The maths is multiplication. The hard part is naming the units and showing where each number came from. A slide that says “CHF 4 billion TAM” without a source is decoration. Investors and boards in Switzerland are used to a small domestic market; they notice when the denominator is hand-waving.

This checklist is for founders and innovation leads who need a defensible sketch before they commit build budget. It sits beside problem work and interviews, not instead of them. If you have not written the problem in one sentence yet, start with how to validate a startup idea. Deeper question lists live in customer interview questions and problem validation before building.

TAM

Total addressable market: all buyers who could use the outcome if every barrier vanished.

SAM

Serviceable addressable market: the slice you can serve with your product, language, regulation and go-to-market.

SOM

Serviceable obtainable market: the share you can credibly win in the period you are planning for, given sales capacity.

A checklist to calculate without fantasy numbers

• Write the buyer and the job in one line, not the feature list.
• Pick a unit you can count: sites, licences, employees in role, machines, not “the economy”.
• Find a primary source: federal statistics, a sector association table, or a paid report you can cite.
• Apply SAM filters you can defend: language region, legal form, size band, existing tool, geography.
• Cap SOM with sales reality: conversations per month, partners, support load, not “1 % of SAM” by default.
• State what would falsify the model: wrong unit, outdated table, or a filter that excludes your first five customers.

Start from the unit, not from revenue

Top-down slides often begin with a global analyst number and shrink it with percentages. That is fast and easy to challenge. Bottom-up starts with entities you can list or query: enterprises in a NACE class from the Federal Statistical Office, members on an association site, public register entries, or your own export from a CRM after interviews.

Convert to money only when you have a sourced price or contract band. Multiplying “units times a guess” produces a big CHF line that sounds precise. If you do not have a price anchor from quotes, pilots or public tariffs, stay in units until you do.

Swiss filters that change SAM quickly

Switzerland is small and segmented. Three filters often cut TAM harder than founders expect:

• Language: a German-only product does not service all Swiss buyers. Treat Romandy and Ticino as out of SAM unless you ship and support there.
• Regulation and data: health, finance and public-sector buyers add procurement and hosting rules. That is a SAM boundary, not a footnote.
• Cross-border: DACH or EU revenue may belong in a separate line. Mixing “Swiss TAM” with export hope inflates one slide and hides where you will actually sell first.

SOM is where optimism dies politely. If only one founder sells part-time, SOM is the number of closed deals or pilots the calendar allows, not SAM divided by one hundred. A common mistake is treating SOM as a market share fantasy. Treat it as capacity planning.

What TAM SAM SOM does not prove

A large TAM does not mean strangers will buy. A tiny SAM can still be a good business if unit economics work and you can reach buyers. SOM is not a forecast; it is a sanity check on whether your go-to-market matches the calendar.

Market size also does not protect an idea. Under Swiss law, ideas as such cannot be protected. The worksheet is for prioritisation and conversation with partners, not for substituting discovery.

A made-up example: three nested filters

A made-up example: a solo founder wants workflow software for independent physiotherapy practices in Switzerland. They do not publish a franc total on the slide.

TAM (units). They define the buyer as a practice, not a patient. They note that federal business statistics publish enterprise counts by industry and size; they plan to pull the relevant table and record the publication year in the footnote. They also list the professional association as a cross-check, because some practices may not appear where they expect in NACE coding.

SAM (units). They remove practices that are single-handed without admin staff, because the product assumes a handover between reception and clinicians. They remove French- and Italian-speaking cantons for year one, because support and templates are German only. They remove practices that already signed a multi-year suite from an incumbent vendor, using public references on the vendor site only as a rough filter, not as a precise census.

SOM (units). They can run fifteen qualified conversations a month through referrals and one conference season. They cap year-one SOM at the number of pilots they can onboard without breaking support, not at a percentage of SAM.

The slide they show investors has three integers with sources, plus a line that SOM is capacity-limited. The next test is still behavioural: paid pilots, not a larger TAM font.

When the product validation package fits

If your SAM in units looks plausible and the risky assumption is whether anyone will pay or return, spreadsheets have done their job. The product validation package is built for that next step: a deployed product, measurement from day one, paid acquisition on Google and LinkedIn, and up to three pivot iterations before a Go, Pivot or Stop recommendation with what the data still cannot prove. It fits when you are ready to trade desk math for observed behaviour, not when you still need to name the buyer.